A volcano on the landscape of the right

How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)

The World According to Ann Coulter

Ann Coulter

Crown Forum: 354 pp., $26.95

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Long before I ever heard of Ann Coulter, the Miss Mullah of the Peroxide Right, I had scribbled the outlines of a story about a woman -- a progressive author and commentator -- who was losing earning power because the field was so crowded with other progressive women authors and commentators, inasmuch as women were, in the main, smart enough to realize where their political and personal interests lay.

Applying supply-and-demand principles, the woman dyed her hair blond and underwent an equally artificial and calculated political conversion into that rara and well-paid avis, a right-wing sound-bite babe. This worked fine until she almost lost her family and her guy because of their contempt for her faux self. So she let her hair go back to its real color, got her ego out of the blind trust, and talked and wrote happily ever after.

Coulter very likely believes everything she says and writes, which makes her far more entertaining than my wimpy protagonist. She stands out even in that overpopulated right field misnamed “talking” heads. The talking is closer to yelling, and the palm goes to the man or woman who can holler the loudest and weirdest, and in this Coulter has made the niche her own. There’s something marvelously brazen about the bubble she has blown for herself to inhabit, like the fabulous San Francisco eccentric who declared himself to be emperor of the United States and whose “subjects” humored him to the extent of printing his scrip for him and picking up his restaurant tabs. I wouldn’t find Coulter nearly so engaging if this were an act, if she were not her own first and best true believer.

“How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)” is a collection of her commentaries and her fourth book. Remember the moment in the Harry Potter film when an animated message for one young wizard from his mum comes screeching into school and starts berating him publicly? It’s called a howler, and that’s what her writings are. They leap off the pages and begin scolding. Of course she sticks up for the Confederate battle flag, Joe McCarthy and Elian’s Miami Relatives. Of course she finds nothing admirable in the American Bar Assn. or the Clinton or Kennedy family trees -- although she wrote for George magazine.

On television recently, she observed that “women are not that bright,” and in this book, she writes of postpartum depression’s effect, in British law, on prosecuting a new mother who kills her baby: “If women are so gaga insane after giving birth, is it really wise to allow them to cast votes in important national elections in which the leader of the free world is chosen?” Liberals hate religion. Liberals hate America. Why not go to war for oil? Why not invade Islamic countries, “kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity”? So what if Iraqis looted their own museums? “We’re not talking about Rodins here.” So determined was she to make this point that she actually said something nice about a Frenchman to do it.

See? You just saved $26.95 ($37.95 in Canada, where prescription drugs are still cheaper than here).

Some liberals sweat and fret over Coulter’s writings. Cottage industries have sprung up to fact-check her. To what end? Brevity is an enemy of the journalist; it militates against nuance and context. Brevity for writers like Coulter is a tool of the trade: The more you leave out, the more you rid yourself of factual clutter that weighs down that sweeping conclusion you already decided to reach. In her column about the mush brains who opposed giving airline pilots guns in the cockpits, she didn’t point out that one of the most ardent Senate supporters of arming pilots was California’s little pink lady herself, Barbara Boxer.

Like the imaginary monster under the kid’s bed, Coulter is only dangerous if you take her seriously. If you do, then she’s a woman falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded country. If you don’t, she’s a far-right Michael Moore with a standing salon appointment -- a polemicist with a brilliant shtick. And speaking of Moore, surely Coulter would have advised the Michigan GOP not to demand that prosecutors charge him with illegally buying votes. He told students that he’d give them clean underwear and ramen noodles if they promised to vote. This kind of thing is oxygen to Moore, just as liberal huffing is to Coulter.

The cartoon straw men and women Coulter assembles for target practice are funny because they’re unrecognizable as real people. It reminds me of a schoolyard taunt: “I’m rubber; you’re glue. What bounces off me sticks to you.” Her rubber is actually glue: She can berate liberals for calling Republicans names, then go off in print on the “Spawn of Satan convention in Boston” attended by “corn-fed, no make-up, natural fiber, no-bra needing, sandal-wearing, hirsute, somewhat fragrant hippie chick pie wagons.” An Associated Press reporter who disputed something she wrote is a “fantasist.” Expatriate blonds “Gwynnie” Paltrow and Madonna prove that Americans hate America, and by the way, Madonna’s fake everyday British accent “is better than the one Paltrow uses in her movies,” which proves exactly what? She employs virtually every grammatical form of “hysteria,” verb, adverb, noun, adjective. Her English teacher would be proud.

It’s a pity that in her polemical rush, she tramples her own witty lines. Her syndicated column makes her so little money, she says, that “I would have made more money by delivering newspapers than by writing for them.” It would have been even funnier if she hadn’t preceded that with the petulant “No newspaper in America big enough to be on LexisNexis will carry my syndicated column.”

Coulter’s politics are like those of the Black Panthers: You are either part of the solution or part of the problem. She and her crowd believe they alone hold the pink slip to America, and everyone else is just trying to hot-wire their country.

The only person who could change Coulter’s mind is ... Ann Coulter. Could it happen? There’s a talking “Ann Coulter” doll, programmed with her own sound bites, and most memorably in this election where swing voters may be the only voters whose ballots matter, the doll says: “Swing voters are more appropriately known as idiot voters because they have no set of philosophical principles.” Americans who actually want to know something before deciding what to do about it? Those traitors.